Louis Bouyer

Louis Bouyer (17 February 1913 – 22 October 2004) was a French Lutheran minister who was received into the Catholic Church in 1939. During his religious career he was a scholar who was relied upon during the Second Vatican Council.

He was known for his books on Christian spirituality and its history. Along with Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and others, he was a co-founder of the international review Communio. He was chosen by the pope to be part of a team to initiate the International Theological Commission in 1969.

Born into a Protestant family in Paris, Louis Bouyer, after a receiving a degree from the Sorbonne, studied theology with the Protestant faculties of Paris and then Strasbourg. He was ordained a Lutheran minister in 1936 and served as vicar of the Lutheran parish of the Trinity in Paris until World War II. In 1939, the study of the christology and ecclesiology of St. Athanasius of Alexandria led Bouyer to the Catholic Church.

Received into the Catholic Church in the Abbey of Saint-Wandrille (Seine-Maritime) in 1944, he entered the congregation of the priests of the Oratory, and remained with them the rest of his life. He was a professor at the Catholic Institute of Paris until 1963 and then taught in England, Spain, and the United States. In 1969 he wrote the book The Decomposition of Catholicism, which presented what he saw as important liturgical and dogmatic problems in the Church.